1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of software application development and, in particular, to service-oriented programming and guaranteed invocation/consumption of nested, composite software services.
2. Description of the Related Art
The current art of asynchronous message-oriented communication provides for guaranteed messaging. Based on the current art, a messaging system such as IBM's MQSERIES will guarantee the once and only once processing of a message. With the advent of Web Services and standards-based, service-oriented communication, the same concept has been extended to the delivery and processing of the input data of a service upon consumption.
Service-oriented programming introduces the concept of nested composite software services, where a software service may contain other software services that may themselves be composite software services. The current art of guaranteed messaging and reliable service-oriented communication is based on guaranteed delivery of messages or inputs of a service and does not address guaranteed consumption/invocation of nested composite services. In fact, addressing the guaranteed consumption/invocation of nested composite services is beyond the scope of the current approach to guaranteed messaging and reliable service-oriented communication.
Without innovative features such as guaranteed invocation/consumption of nested composite services, service-oriented programming, applications and architecture cannot address the needs of mission-critical applications.